10:00 AM
Two hours of fruitless searching had finally yielded results, though not of the kind Robin had been hoping for. About six levels down, he'd found what had once been an intersection of tunnels. Most of them had been blocked off, their ceilings collapsed. Except one, which was itself shielded and guarded by the same electric field as that which surrounded Gotham.
Robin had been able to see the device beyond, but had no way of reaching it. He couldn't very well blast the tunnels, he'd bring the whole place down on his head. He'd spent some time looking at the device, trying to get a good view of it.
But the splash of crimson electric current made it hard to see. And, every time he got close to it, the whiplashes of electricity would come after him, driving him back and threatening to kill him then and there. He couldn't get a good look at the device, no matter how hard he'd tried.
Eventually, he'd had to give it up. He needed to go back to the batcave, regroup with the others, see if KF had any ideas on how to get past this blockade, as well as give himself some time to think the problem over. There was a solution, there had to be.
The close oppression of the tunnels gradually gave way to the open stillness of the world above. The air had grown colder, and now seemed to taste stale, just as the air below did. It was colder above ground than below, there was nothing to confine warmth out here, it just rose up to the ceiling of the filter.
But that was far from the worst of it. Before reaching the surface, Robin suddenly had the sense that something was terribly wrong up ahead. He paused in the darkness, uneasy as he had not been before. Something told him that he didn't really want to go up there.
He shifted from one foot to the other indecisively. He had to go up there, he had to get out. Was there a better way to go about it? But no, there was just the subway entrance, a straight staircase up to the outside. No way of concealing one's self.
Whatever it was, Robin was going to have to meet it head on. Assuming that it was an enemy, which he felt unsure of. A rumble, as of thunder, sounded overhead. He didn't like that sound, which was rapidly followed by the thin wail of sirens. Bad sounds.
Robin eased his way up the stairs, hugging to the left, protecting his uninjured arm as well as using his body to keep it out of view of any he might encounter on his way up. His left hand rested near his utility belt, ready to grab a smoke pellet or birdarang as needed.
He'd had to rearrange his equipment to account for his broken arm, which was virtually useless. Though there were pockets all around his utility belt, it had a certain bias toward the right, his favored arm, with the equipment he used most being easily accessible from that side. He'd had to switch everything around. He could reach anywhere on the belt with his left hand, of course, but fractions of seconds often counted and it took longer to get into some pockets than others.
As it turned out, Robin needn't have bothered. The danger wasn't to him specifically. People ran up and down sidewalks, some out in the street, dodging among cars whose horns were all blaring futilely. Manic, everyone was manic. They were breaking into buildings, mostly stores, smashing windows, stealing supplies they normally would have bought, most of them with no idea what was important and what wasn't. They were preparing for an apocalypse.
They shouldn't have bothered. This would all be over shortly, and no stock of spam and bottled water was going to help.
It felt strange to emerge in the middle of all this bustle and go virtually unnoticed. Robin wasn't supposed to be out in the open like this. Not that he'd had much choice. And this area had been virtually abandoned earlier. Something had obviously changed.
Of course. People had stopped trying to flee, because there was nowhere to go.
It was amazing how quickly they changed from one strategy to another, even without any training or coercion. It was all useless, of course, but still impressive. Downright alarming was the mob mentality, as people lashed out against their neighbors to protect whatever treasures they clung to.
Men in business suits, women in heels, vagrants in rags and teens in T-shirts and jeans, all were doing the same thing, taking part in what seemed like a case of mass insanity. Every one reacting instinctively, just wanting to survive.
Robin's mind flashed back to that moment, two weeks ago, when his own mind had shut out all thought, leaving him only with instinct. The instinct to survive. It wasn't rational, conformed to no type of reason. It was action without thought, necessary but often misguided to the point of doing more harm than good. In retrospect, he found himself wondering if it hadn't been the reaction itself that had led him to ruin that day. Perhaps it had been his own fighting back that had broken the bone. That's what was happening here.
The instinct to survive, to fight or flee, was only useful if you knew how to do any of those things. It was almost funny, tragic but funny, to realize that this entire city was wholly ignorant. Not one person out here knew the first thing about survival. How ever had they lived so long?
These people who needed warning labels to tell them not to put knives in a toaster, or to use their hair dryer in the shower. How did they make it moment to moment? How did they even manage to get up in the morning? It was no surprise that what was happening now made no sense and did nothing to accomplish anything. These were people who'd stick a fork in a light socket if there wasn't a warning label for that.
Robin felt a wash of protectiveness. These people needed all the help they could get. Stupid as they were, they were no less human for it. No less alive, no less important. Important to what? Well, best to leave that for scholars. Right at the moment, Robin had better things to do than ponder humankind.
As he was about to make for a rooftop, Robin caught a motion in the corner of his eye. He didn't know what it was, or why it attracted his attention. After all, there was wild, frantic activity all around. But he turned to look, and knew all at once why he'd been drawn to the motion.
A family of five had darted across the street, trusting a slight break in the traffic. In doing so, the youngest child had dropped her doll. Once across, the parents were distracted with whatever it was they were trying to do. With three young kids, it was hard to keep track of all of them. The little girl escaped notice and was going back for her dolly.
It was an old story, one that didn't always have a happy ending. Robin didn't bother to measure the distance, to guess whether he could sprint that far, or get there fast enough, before the whirl of traffic swallowed the girl whole, only to spit her out after breaking her apart and taking her life.
He just went. He ran low, and bowled over a number of people, even jumping a small crowd by leaping onto the back of a bench and then flipping over them. It took precious seconds to make it from subway entrance to where the girl was. In all of that, not one person noticed what Robin had already processed and decided to act on. Nobody noticed the girl, not even her parents were aware of her absence.
Robin dove into the street, swept the girl into his arms and rolled the rest of the way across, his momentum carrying him right into the front of a building, which he slammed into hard enough to knock the breath out of his chest.
Nobody noticed that at first either. They were so absorbed in their panic that not a person on the street took note of what would normally be considered a miraculous and timely rescue.
It gave Robin the time he needed to get his breath. He was holding the girl too tightly, and she was thrashing and hitting him with her tiny fists, whaling on his head with her battered doll. He didn't let her go, knowing that she'd run for her parents, who were across the street.
By this point, they had noticed their daughter's absence and were looking about frantically, calling her name even though their voices were drowned in the surrounding din. Then one of their kids pulled on his father's pants leg and pointed across the street.
By this time Robin had regained his sense of time and place as well as having gotten his feet under him. He waited for a slight break in the traffic and then darted across, expertly dodging as a red sports car seemed to rocket from nowhere as though Hellbent on taking him out.
Only then did he put the girl down. She immediately ran to her mother and wrapped chubby child arms around the woman's legs. Her mother reached down and picked her up, clutching her as though she would never let her daughter go again.
"You're an angel, Robin," the woman said tearfully, but the masked boy shook his head.
"You should all go home. There's no point in being out here in all of this. All you'll do out here is lose your lives. Take your family where it's safe and stay there. If not for your sake, do it for your children. Get out of this madness while you're still in one piece."
He turned away from them and walked away quickly, before they could see him shaking. He'd poured absolutely every bit of energy he had into that sprint. Fear had caught him in that moment, he'd let it overwhelm him. Now he felt drained, now his mind forced him to face images of what could have been. There'd been no time for that in the moment, but now he saw how it could have gone differently.
He could have been too late. The girl could have been crushed under a wheel. Or he could have died with her in the street. So easily could it have all gone differently. He was shaking from the aftermath, terror gripping him now that he'd let it in. He was dizzy with it.
He made his way to an alley where he was sick behind a dumpster.
Then, feeling better, he went on. He'd been willing to give his life for that little girl, but it had been returned to him, and so now he must go on, must continue. It was more than his duty, it was his privilege granted to him because he was still alive, and because he was still capable.
"Now it's time," the rabbit man said from his chair, "Flip that switch over there."
His employee hurried to obey him before he became impatient. The switch in question was a trigger for a program designed by the old gentleman for just this occasion. It allowed him to override every single news channel, to take them over and display his own recorded video, giving them the highlights of what was happening to Gotham. Only the news channels, of course. Anything else would be silly.
After all, the people who were still watching the golf channel would just turn the TV off if they saw what was happening to Gotham. They weren't the curious types. But the people who watched the news... well they were already glued to their screens anyway. They'd watch anything, no matter how tragic or inane it might be. They'd already watched for hours while reporters prattled senselessly and politicians gave their misguided opinions and famous psychologists were interviewed to try and explain why this was happening as though it truly mattered.
Across the country, people were made wholly aware of the chaos which reigned within the walls of Gotham. They were subjected to humanity in the raw, uncut and uncensored. Interestingly, perhaps the only people who weren't aware were the ones who might have been able to do something, because those people, those vigilante heroes, were already embroiled in trying to save some other city, some other country, some other world, some other piece of struggling, desperate humanity, and they were too busy with their important work to stop and watch the news. But for everyone else...
"Let them stew over that for a time," the rabbit man said, stroking his bunny, "Let them wonder how I did it, and try to put a stop to this revelation. And when they've exhausted themselves with that, then it will be time for me to explain why this is happening. Yes."
